Whether it’s the unforeseen and positive consequences of combining two drugs in melanoma, the first head-to-head trial of pazopanib in kidney cancer, or a Spanish presentation on lung cancer which will send researchers back to the drawing board, the messages from ESMO 2012 were many and varied. The importance of understanding cancer biology before progressing in trials was discussed, along with the affordability, or lack of it, of current approaches.

Here, Reinhard Dummer, Manuela Schmidinger, Riitta Kokko, Solange Peters, Jean-Yves Blay and Richard Sullivan tell Helen Saul what they found to be the most important take-home messages.